The invention relates generally to automatic guidance systems and more specifically to a global navigation satellite system (GNSS) based sensor for vehicle steering control.
Movable machinery, such as agricultural equipment, open-pit mining machines, airplane crop dusters and the like all benefit from accurate global navigation satellite system (GNSS) high precision survey products, and others. However, in existing satellite positioning systems (SATPS) for guided parallel and contour swathing for precision farming, mining, and the like, the actual curvature of terrain may not be taken into account. This results in a less than precise production because of the less than precise parallel or contour swathing. Indeed, in order to provide swaths through a field (in farming, for example), the guidance system collects positions of the vehicle as it moves across the field. When the vehicle commences the next pass through the field, the guidance system offsets the collected positions for the previous pass by the width of the equipment (i.e. swath width). The next set of swath positions is used to provide guidance to the operator as he or she drives the vehicle through the field.
The current vehicle location, as compared to the desired swath location, is provided to the vehicle's operator or to a vehicle's steering system. The SATPS provides the 3-D location of signal reception (for instance, the 3-D location of the antenna). If only 3-D coordinates are collected, the next swath computations assume a flat terrain offset. However, the position of interest is often not the same as where the satellite receiver (SR) is located since the SR is placed in the location for good signal reception, for example, for a tractor towing an implement, the best location for the SR may be on top of the cab. However, the position of interest (POI) for providing guidance to the tractor operator may be the position on the ground below the operator. If the tractor is on flat terrain, determining this POI is a simple adjustment to account for the antenna height.
However, if the tractor is on an inclined terrain with a variable tilt, which is often the case, the SATPS alone cannot determine the terrain tilt so the POI also cannot be determined. This results in a guidance error because the POI is approximated by the point of reception (POR), and this approximation worsens as the terrain inclination increases. This results in cross track position excursions relative to the vehicle ground track which would contaminate any attempt to guide to a defined field line or swath. On inclined terrain, this error can be minimized by collecting the vehicle tilt configuration along each current pass or the previous pass. The swath offset thus becomes a vector taking the terrain inclination into account with the assumption that from the first swath to the next one the terrain inclination does not change too much. It can therefore be seen that there is a need for a better navigation/guidance system for use with a ground-based vehicle that measures and takes into account vehicle tilt.
Various navigation systems for ground-based vehicles have been employed but each includes particular disadvantages. Systems using Doppler radar will encounter errors with the radar and latency. Similarly, gyroscopes, which may provide heading, roll, or pitch measurements, may be deployed as part of an inertial navigation package, but tend to encounter drift errors and biases and still require some external attitude measurements for gyroscope initialization and drift compensation. Gyroscopes have good short-term characteristics but undesirable long-term characteristics, especially those gyro copes of lower cost such as those based on a vibrating resonator. Similarly, inertial systems employing gyroscopes and accelerometers have good short-term characteristics but also) suffer from drift. Various systems include navigating utilizing GNSS; however, these systems also exhibit disadvantages. Existing GNSS position computations may include lag times, which may be especially troublesome when, for example, GNSS velocity is used to derive vehicle heading. As a result, the position (or heading) solution provided by a GNSS receiver tells a user where the vehicle was a moment ago, but not in real time. Existing GNSS systems do not provide high quality heading information at slower vehicle speeds. Therefore, what is needed is a low cost sensor system to facilitate vehicle swath navigation that makes use of the desirable behavior of both GNSS and inertial units while eliminating or reducing non-desirable behavior. Specifically, what is needed is a means to employ low-cost gyroscopes (e.g., micro electromechanical (MEM) gyroscopes) which exhibit very good short-term low noise and high accuracy while removing their inherent long-term drift.